Hands On: Dreamfall Chapters

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Dreamfall Chapters opens with a series of nightmares, wasting no time before informing the player of the high stakes and gravity of its multi-threaded plot. It’s a personal story, of family and sacrifice, but the potential consequences are cosmic. In truth, it’s not a single story at all, it’s a collection of stories within stories and about stories, taking the disparate worlds of The Longest Journey and weaving a larger tapestry. I’ve played the first three hours and found something quite different to the point and click adventure I was expecting.

Dreamfall Chapters isn’t a traditional adventure game. Tørnquist and his new independent studio, Red Thread Games, contains several ex-Funcom members, but they’re looking to the future rather than the past. A key goal, for this and future games, is to explore ways to build an interactive experience in which the process of playing is structured around narrative and characters rather than puzzles and roadblocks. In Chapters, occasional hurdles require intellectual prodding but, based on conversations with the team and the time spent with the game, the main challenge is to integrate emotional responses into an interactive narrative.

Flying in the face of my expectations, Dreamfall Chapters is a Kickstarted continuation of a story from gaming’s past that isn’t content to tickle the nostalgia glands of its ready-made audience. Red Thread want to tell their story and to fill in the strands of the web but in doing so they’re asking questions about the nature of narrative games. A key issue is to find ways to involve players in ways that wouldn’t be feasible if they were watching a video playthrough. Another key issue is to avoid the obvious solution that was the stealth and combat of the previous Dreamfall – the player’s interactions with the game must fit with the theme and story. And they should, above all, be enjoyable.

One of Zoe’s early lines taps on the fourth wall. I paraphrase: “I remember climbing around, sneaking, fighting – things I’m not supposed to be doing.” When I ask Tørnquist if this is a deliberately sly reference, and a self-deprecating one at that, he laughs. Of course it is. There’s precious little to laugh at in the grand narrative sweep of the Dreamfall saga, which can make it easy to forget the humour in the scripts. The characters, not the situations, are the basis of that humour and from the earliest scenes in The Longest Journey’s Border House there has been as much (if not more) time and effort placed on building the finer details of those characters than on the grander scope of the mythology.

It’s a relief, then, to see that the Serious Business that reintroduces players to the series’ worlds within worlds falls away, making room for the poignancy of the personal. Dreamfall’s Zoe is the focus, eking out an existence in the future noir of Europolis, a continent become a city that is on the verge of political upheaval. Elections are approaching and Zoe splits her time between therapy, campaigning for a new leader and a better future, and working in a machine shop with a foul-mouthed short-tempered boss and her mute colleague, Wit, who is a gentle giant with intimidating body modifications.

There’s a boyfriend too, whose journalistic work provides an alternate view of the political situation. The game’s opening lays out Zoe’s almost mythical status and ties it to the sci-fi tech of Europolis, but in a pleasing echo of The Longest Journey, a return to normalcy follows. Fantastical worlds exist and Zoe has a terrifying destiny to fulfil, but there’s plenty of time to rediscover the magic of the mundane.

I mined the Europolis hub for every line of dialogue, colouring in the corners of the world and spending as much time as possible with its characters. Tørnquist tells me that he wants to warn people that there are meaty great conversations throughout Dreamfall Chapters – “it’s a game where almost everybody has a lot to say” – and even in their unfinished state, the three major sections that I played are dense. It’d certainly be possible to hit all the key conversation points and rush forward, but it’d be like skimming through a novel, reading every other page, or wandering through an art gallery while browsing the web on your phone.

The world has been designed to encourage exploration, through observation as well as conversation, and the writing is strong enough to reward the curious. Zoe has undergone something of a personality transplant and is pleasant to spend time with, while having just enough gaps in her motivations and opinions for the player to insert little pieces of themselves. Like a Telltale protagonist, Zoe is malleable, as is her story.

With the concept of destiny so central to the plot, it’d be strange if the fate of worlds could be tipped by the player’s choices, but seemingly minor decisions early in the game may have repercussions throughout. While all roads leave to the same final destination, there are many variations on the final scenes, depending who has survived the journey and how the relationships between characters have developed.

The shadow of The Walking Dead looms large. Tørnquist tells me that Chapters is “far closer to a Telltale game than it is to The Longest Journey”. Indeed, while I’m told that the puzzles become more complex as the story progresses, the first areas only require a minimum of ‘adventure game logic’. At one point, a bug in the build I was playing meant that I was left without a vital inventory item. Not realising that anything had gone wrong, I tried to find a solution by rummaging through memories of the previous games. I fully expected a convoluted mix of backtracking, abstract item combinations and inflatable ducks.

Not the case. As soon as the problem was fixed – in a matter of seconds once someone became aware of my plight – the solution was obvious and, despite requiring an item, based in dialogue. There are a few inventory-based puzzles in the portion I played but every object has a credible reason to exist in the place where it Is found and seemingly incidental lines of speech provide clues to those paying attention.

Conversation choices usually involve clicking through a list of keywords, one by one, but occasionally a decision must be made. Tørnquist is adamant that these decisions are not moral choices, pointing to the extremes of Bioware’s light and dark scales as something he wants to avoid. Instead, the choice is often between a rock and a hard place, or a selection from a takeaway lunch menu. When selecting a response, hovering over each option plays out the player character’s inner monologue, so there are no nasty surprises a la LA Noire, when a prompt to suggest someone might be lying sometimes lead to a pop-eyed stream of expletives.

Being able to hear the character’s reasoning behind every possibility before picking doesn’t just give the player more control, it also provides an emotional and psychological consistency. Characters provide credible reasons as to why they might act a certain way rather than flipping between good cop and bad cop from one moment to the next. Thinking through possibilities alongside the player characters gives a stronger sense of attachment, creating a sense of responsibility. ‘Guilt’ is a word that came up during conversation about the decisions that come later in the game.

While Dreamfall Chapters does overlap with Telltale’s recent games, it differs in one key area. The district of Europolis that I’ve seen is open for exploration. It isn’t particularly large – which cuts down on backtracking and the sort of scenery-scanning what would be a new form of pixel hunting – but there’s plenty to look at. I played with mouse and keyboard, though controllers are supported as well, and the control scheme seems sensible. Standard third-person movement with the WASD keys and hotspot-clicking with the mouse. Moving close to an interactive element causes a highlight to appear, so there’s no need to scour the screen.

There’s still plenty to see though. Posters, shop signs and even the clothes that people wear tell their own stories. Europolis is richly textured and every logo and campaign slogan contains a little piece of background information. It’s here that the details of the design process can be seen most clearly. Unlike Telltale’s games or even The Longest Journey, Chapters allows players to set their own pace. That, I believe, is why the more esoteric puzzles have been pushed aside – they act like a stop sign, killing momentum. Equally, the game rarely takes away control, as occurs in The Walking Dead and Wolfamongous, instead allowing players to investigate the quieter corners of the world at their own leisure.

I learned that Ireland has become a feral state, with limited technology and a single daily ferry from Liverpool as its only contact with the outside world. Also that Africa is a first-world paradise in comparison to the slums of Europolis. I picked up some future slang and discovered that corporations are creating hallucinogenic Cola to force brand mascot imagery into peoples’ minds. None of that, as far as I know, will be essential to the plot but it adds to the credibility of the world, and like the Coens, Red Thread do great minor characters.

There’s always the possibility that the story will become less attractive when it moves back toward the magic and mythology. I tend to prefer the small details and my favourite memories of the series are in the quiet moments, when April and Zoe confront recognisable problems in the midst of fantastical scenarios. There’s plenty of that in the opening hours and the delivery, with the hub and conversation systems, is intelligent. It’s also surprisingly emotional, even in these opening scenes (I almost needed to borrow John’s ‘No Tears’ shampoo despite being in an office surrounded by programmers), and a large part of that is due to the excellent score.

As someone who wants to see the end of the story, I’m relieved to see that the budget and talent seem equal to the task. But playing with the early build and talking to the creators was satisfying in other ways. There’s an ambition about Chapters that I hadn’t expected, a desire not just to tie up loose ends in a familiar fashion but to find out what a narrative interactive adventure can be if some lessons are forgotten and some new ones are constructed along the way.

Disclaimer – John has this to say. Nothing I’ve seen has his grubby fingerprints on it. More on Red Thread and Dreamfall Chapters later this week, along with a closer look at horror-mystery Draugen.

Great writeup, Adam. I’m not as kind towards TLJ and Dreamfall as many of the people who comment on this site. I wish I could forget the humour in both games, to be honest – I found it mostly ranged from grating to staggeringly bad (the inn sign in Dreamfall ranks as one of the worst “jokes” I’ve ever seen in a videogame) – and I think the world-building ranged from decent to mediocre (I found very little of the future in Dreamfall particularly interesting or believable, at least as far as the fine detail went) so I retain a definite scepticism about your praise for both those things. That said, I liked both games, which is quite something for me given how much I dislike most point and clickers, and even if I feel Ragnar Tornquist’s work is over-rated I still both admire him and really, really hope he gets to carry on making games. For all the flaws of Dreamfall as I saw them (Jesus, that combat really was unforgivably bad) I was still reaching for John’s shampoo in the end, too. I’m glad to see Chapters seems to be coming along so well.

Each time I see an Internet commenter share with the world the phrase ‘good writeup’, ‘great writeup’ etc. I slam my desk furiously. There’s no such thing as a writeup, unless you count an accounting term. That’s not even a word. What an irritating meme.

I still can’t fully comprehend that the story of Dreamfall will finally get a closure and I’m a backer on this. Dreamfall and Tex Murphy, two series I thought were long dead. Both of them proved their deaths as exaggeration.

There’s an ambition about Chapters that I hadn’t expected, a desire not just to tie up loose ends in a familiar fashion but to find out what a narrative interactive adventure can be if some lessons are forgotten and some new ones are constructed along the way.

One thing Tørnquist has never lacked is ambition!

As someone who never experienced the golden ages of point’n’click adventures I found TLJ extremely interesting but kind of hard to persevere with. So hearing what Chapters is trying to do makes me very excited.

“We are combining the best parts of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to create what we hope will be another classic adventure; a game filled with mature dialogue and challenging puzzles, exciting exploration, complex and fun characters, thrilling plot twists and an engaging and emotional story.”

I wonder when ‘challenging puzzles’ and ‘exciting exploration’ turned into an ‘interactive experience’ and something ‘far closer to a Telltale game than it is to The Longest Journey’.

It’s not the direction I would have picked, but there is a lot of wiggle room in starting out aiming for somewhere between Dreamfall and TLJ. I’m surprised you are glad to not have backed something that looks to be shaping up into another brilliant, if flawed gameplay wise, bit of storytelling from Ragnar which will wrap up the cliffhangers. I’m glad to have helped this to exist – even if it sounds like it’s not quite the adventure game I would have preferred.

I do hope the puzzles tickle my brain a little more, at least later in the game, than the article suggests :/

Hey, Jane Jensen claimed there would be puzzles in Moebius too, and look how that turned out…
I am slightly more hopeful in this case but it’s still disappointing to learn that even something that clearly isn’t targeted mainly at the mainstream casual audience (since it is part of a series) has opted for the “emotional storytelling” get-out.

” A key goal, for this and future games, is to explore ways to build an interactive experience in which the process of playing is structured around narrative and characters rather than puzzles and roadblock”

I would recommend everybody to play through TLJ, maybe even with strategy guide, because puzzles were the weakest part of that game. Absolutely one of the best stories ever told through this medium, without a question one of the best examples of voice acting i’ve heard in a video game, it will make you feel farm and fuzzy inside and anticipate Chapters even more.

Really glad I backed this. I really liked Dreamfall, though I was frustrated that there was not more room to interact with and explore its interesting world and rather upset with the cliffhanger(s) ending at the time… so this sounds like basically everything I want out of a new Dreamfall, resolving story, going deeper into the world and focusing on characters.

I guess there’s a division in old adventure game fans between those who mainly liked them for the great stories and wonderful characters (which were sadly lacking in other genres at the time) and those who preferred the extreme lateral thinking of puzzles often so obscure (hello rubber duck!) they could only be solved with trial and error, or a walkthrough… Both are fun, but I’m sure glad this isn’t going to be a by the numbers point & click.

I wasn’t even that upset with the cliffhanger, though, to be fair, I wasn’t expecting it to take eight years to get back to it.

If I’m playing a story-based game, I actually want to be able to finish it. Backtracking over every place I’ve ever been using rubber duckies on everything everywhere for hours just makes me the kind of angry that isn’t fun. I’ve still never been back to Grim Fandango and worked out how to get past the cat races. And even playing the remastered Monkey Island a few years back I got completely stumped because one of the locations I’d forgotten wasn’t obvious on the map and I missed it a load of times when scanning the screen with my mouse.

When I went back to play some old classics I had missed back in the day I basically adopted a policy of: if I’m stuck on a puzzle I’ll sleep on it and if I still can’t solve it the next day I either stop playing or use a walkthrough if I care enough.

Walking around aimlessly trying every item on every item is not very entertaining and there are other things I could be doing. Usually I find I couldn’t solve the thing because I had missed an area that I didn’t realize you could go to or an item I hadn’t pixel-hunted or some other thing that basically comes down to badly communicated design.

RPS has been given a nice little write up in the Dreamfall Chapters backers’ newsletter, by the way. You guys are described as “one of the best gaming sites in the multiverse.” Nice work. Always good to see two things I like also liking each other.

Looking forward to this (obviously, as I’m getting backer e-mails.) As a sequel to Dreamfall it was predictable that they would be continuing down the minimal puzzle route and more focused on player expression through narrative. I would be wary of this, but Telltale have done such a good job of that I have become a bit of convert. Not that I think that the traditional point & click doesn’t have a future, but I don’t think it is the only path the genre can take. Dreamfall the first was not a brilliant example of it though, despite the great story, so I am pleased that it sounds as if they have improved on the formula.

To this that miss the puzzles, green lighting a The Longest Journey 2 was the top stretch goal of the Kickstarter. They didn’t meet it, but I would say that will happen and will be more in the style of the original game.